You Know Why

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, January 30, 2025

This post is in response to What Exactly Are People Mad at Tulsi Gabbard for Doing?

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

 

One of the dispositions that serve conservatives well is their understanding that good intentions do not excuse disastrous results. I am not sure why Michael seems inclined to dispense with that understanding in Gabbard’s case, save that it has become inconvenient.

 

“As Gabbard constantly explained to anyone who would listen, her objective was to seek an end to the war and to prevent deeper U.S. involvement in it,” Michael writes. Even if we take that stated intention at face value — a charitable dispensation — her intentions do not excuse her unconscionable blindness to the world around her.

 

“I asked him tough questions about his own regime’s actions, the use of chemical weapons, and the brutal tactics that were being used against his own people,” Gabbard said when asked during her confirmation hearing what she discussed in the three hours she spent with Bashar al-Assad in Damascus — a trip that was designed to embarrass Donald Trump over his decision to finally enforce Barack Obama’s “red line” (the use of chemical weapons on civilians). Apparently, she came away from that tough conversation wholly convinced that Assad didn’t do it — an assessment that ran contrary to U.S. and European intelligence. To date, the Assadist revisionist narrative she retailed remains unsupported, although she held fast to them well beyond the point at which her position could be attributed to prudence.

 

During her hearing, Senator Mark Kelly pressed Gabbard to explain why she doubted the intelligence indicating that Assad deployed chemical weapons against civilians. She replied that it was her “fear” that the intelligence was “being used as a pretext” for a regime-change operation. In other words, she subordinated the overwhelming assessment of Western intelligence agencies because that assessment might justify a policy she didn’t like.

 

That is precisely why she is unfit for the role to which she has been nominated. Gabbard will determine what goes on and off the president’s daily intelligence briefing. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence itself was established to prevent “stove piping” — the failure to share intelligence based on interagency politics — but Gabbard cannot be trusted to perform that role. Based on her own admission, when her priors conflict with the intelligence, it’s the intelligence that has to go.

 

This is just the most recent judgmental lapse in a career full of them. During Gabbard’s hearing, she suggested (albeit indirectly) that the U.S. and the West were better off with Assad in power — at least when compared with the al-Nusra-linked militants cobbling together a successor regime in Damascus today. Perhaps. But no one should be confused about the threat Assad posed to U.S. security; for much of her public-facing career, Gabbard seems to have been — until that disposition imperiled her political prospects.

 

The Assad regime was an Iranian puppet. It played host to Hezbollah and channeled weapons into Lebanon bound for Israel, where it was used to kill America’s allies (a relationship the anti-Iran successor regime, whatever its demerits are today and may be tomorrow, has severed). The Assad regime actively infiltrated insurgent elements into Iraq where they targeted and killed U.S. troops — activities that culminated in a 2008 raid into Syria to stanch the flow. The Assad regime was propped up by Russia’s armed forces. It provided them with bases in Latakia and Tartus, from which America’s adversary projected power into the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

 

And, despite Gabbard’s credulous assertions to the contrary, at no point were either Assad or Vladimir Putin’s regime invested in attacking Islamist elements during the Syrian civil war. They bombed hospitals and maternity wards, engineered starvation campaigns encircling whole cities like Homs and Aleppo, and subsidized ISIS elements in western Iraq. Russia’s and Assad’s support for Islamist elements in western Syria continued up to the fall of the regime, after which the U.S. targeted the militants that had previously enjoyed the protection of Russian air cover.

 

Michael maintains that Gabbard and company wanted only to keep “America out of the business of being al-Qaeda’s air force.” He has it precisely backward.

 

Those who lent credence to the notion that Assad and Putin were proper stewards of American security expend a lot of energy insisting that they, and they alone, want to keep America out of shooting wars. But their blindness contributed to the conditions that allowed ISIS to thrive, spilling out across the borders of Syria into Iraq and compelling U.S. intervention in the region in 2014; the very outcome noninterventionists insist only their careful stewardship of American foreign policy can prevent.

 

Again, intentions matter, but results matter more.

 

Michael closes with a realist appeal to the notion that, sometimes, the U.S. must work with bad actors abroad because the alternatives are worse. The threat posed by the late Assad regime and the Putin regime may not rise to the level of menace posed by the marauding Danes, but they were not America’s partners. Those regimes were adversaries, one of which continues to seek every opportunity to undermine U.S. interests, imperil the safety of U.S. citizens and our allies, and overturn the U.S.-led geopolitical order we take for granted. I can understand the rationalizations necessary to render that conclusion, but they are rationalizations.